Thursday, March 31, 2016

The world is young. This morning
I noticed that our azalea bushes are getting ready to bloom. The grass is growing out and getting raggedy. Rabbits appear, nibbling on all the new weeds
in our yard. The birdsong is louder, and
my windows are open.

The coming month is full of fiery influences. The fire signs are fresh, impetuous,
spontaneous, playful – like spring. They’re
also hot-blooded, impatient, and sometimes combative. Throughout April, we have four to five planets
in fire signs. The second strongest
element this month will be earth, and this helps ground the energy somewhat.

Of all the fire signs, Aries is the most rambunctious and dynamic, and
there will be a strong Aries influence all through April. So there will be plenty of passion,
especially among the young. I remember
what it was like being young, that constant high level of excitement, anxiety
and confusion, and the endless search for a larger meaning. Young people are vital, creative, full of
promise - but also so easily exploited, so often lacking in worldly power.

Ever since the sun entered Aries, there’s been a spate of deadly terrorist
activity - in Belgium, Turkey, Iraq,
Yemen, and Pakistan. In Lahore, sixty-nine
picnickers died, many of them young, many children. And although I know nothing of the suicide
bomber who carried out the attack, it’s likely he was also young.

The fire signs are the heroic ones, the ones who want to demonstrate
their courage and dedication to noble principles. When a suicide bomber is surrounded by people
praising him for this “selfless” act, how can he turn away from it? He’s caught up in the worship of
violence. Violence is a fetish in every
culture in the world today, although in some much more than in others. Handling instruments of death and
destruction, a person becomes as powerful as a god, for just a moment – and then
it’s over.

With the sun in Aries, this culture of violence is even more apparent
to all of us. We no longer live in a
world where the young are carried up a mountain and sacrificed to the gods with
an obsidian blade. But still, we
practice human sacrifice, and it’s a cause of great suffering.

Even in this fiery month, there’s one factor that might slow the
bloodshed, and that’s Mars turning retrograde.
Mars is the ruler of Aries, and it’s the planet of action, will,
physicality, desire, anger, combat, competition, blood and war. It retrogrades once every two years, and then
stays in apparent reverse motion for a little over two months.

Usually Mars makes a few aspects every month, and these aspects make it
visible. When it makes a soft aspect to
another planet, that planet is suddenly vitalized, and things get done. When it makes a hard aspect to another planet,
the planet has to struggle with some conflictive energy. Either way, the rough, fast energy of Mars comes
through.

But this month, Mars makes no aspects to any other planet. It hovers there, barely moving. In April, its function seems to be mainly
jinxing most plans to move forward. On
all sides, monkey wrenches will be thrown, and gears will grind. It takes a while to find the wrench, extricate
it, and get the engine fixed, and when that’s done, something else may break
down. There’s a pervasive uncertainty,
very different from Mars’ usual brashness.

This is not a particularly good month to attack anybody, especially
after mid-month. And when people do
attack each other, they’re likely to end up hurting themselves. But this doesn’t mean that people will stop
trying, since all this fiery energy seeks outlets. However, we may see more people burnt by their
own matches. For example, more of the
GOP front-runner’s insults could bounce back onto himself. More of his people may get busted for
enacting violence on people in the crowd.

The point of Mars retrograde is to turn us all away from business as
usual. How do we use our energy, our
passion, our will, our amazing physical bodies?
What are we doing with these resources?
When we come to a place where new beginnings are possible, what do we
choose to do? What doors do we
open? What paths do we create, leading
to which futures?

This is the month of the Aries new moon, always a great time to plan
the future. It’s the optimum time for planting
seeds, both literally and figuratively. It’s
a time of renewal for this world we’re living in, a place that’s abundant,
surprising, and beautiful. There’s so
much we can do here, and this is the time to experiment, to try new things, to
follow our inspirations.

With Mars retrograde, we will have to pause though, to look at the
situation in a different way, and sometimes even to refrain from whatever we
passionately desire in the moment. We
might have to attend to the things we’ve learned from the past. We might need patience, and a sense of
humor. We might have to take a lot of
deep breaths until an impulse passes, especially if the impulse involves
firearms. And if we can’t resist, and we
throw a punch, or lob an insult, we might need to step back, before the energy
comes around to us again.

The world is young, and full of vigor. All that we long for is before us. And also before us are the shadows, the
contradictions, the wounds and knotholes, everything that’s part of living. It’s never quite as simple as it appears at
first. It’s okay to hesitate, in this
moment, as we stand here and imagine the new world we are entering.

Wednesday, March 2, 2016

Although it’s cold, it’s exhilarating to
walk outside and feel that fierce wind blowing away one season and bringing on
the next. March is always an amazing month,
since the return of spring never seems quite possible. Those naked, barren trees are like a
permanent feature of the landscape, but it won’t be long before it all comes to
life.

This month holds even more change than
usual. Not only are there two eclipses,
but the outer planets are involved in a dance led by Jupiter. There are indications of rebellion – Jupiter
is inconjunct Uranus, the planet of change.
There are hints of deeper reform – Jupiter is trine Pluto, planet of
long-term trends. And there’s financial
instability – Jupiter is square Saturn, planet of limitation. All this in one month.

With the surge of primaries and caucuses
in March, it’s clear that stakes are being raised, bets are being placed, and
winners and losers declared. But I think
that more is going on.

My own feeling is that the Republican
Party is in its death throes. It’s
becoming unhinged, dividing itself into two parties, at odds with each other. If they do give Trump the nomination, then a
big block of Republicans will split off, call themselves something different,
and run their own candidate. If they
manage not to nominate him, he’ll start his own movement of renegade
Republicans. My sense is that there are
people working out plans for both these eventualities, right now.

It figures that the Republican Party
would divide eventually. It’s been the
party of racists and millionaires, and what do these two constituencies have in
common? Not all that much. The goal of uber-wealthy families is to hang
on to their assets, and the goal of racists is to hold on to a perceived
personal superiority, even when it doesn’t benefit them in any way.

For the last fifty years, the
super-wealthy have used racism and misogyny as tools, sometimes overtly and
sometimes subtly, as ways to increase their own power and influence. Anything that makes money for them is branded
as good, and anything that distributes money more fairly – unions, public education, welfare, women’s
rights – is bad, or sometimes just terminally unhealthy, and is blamed on “those
people”. This has been the tactic that
created the modern Republican party.

But we live in something of a democracy,
and so politicians have had to come out in favor of the things that ordinary
(non-rich) people want. This requires
artfulness. They have to say “small
business” when they mean big corporations, “safety” when they’re talking about profit-driven
prisons, and “national security” when they’re trying to boost weapons dealers.

And now here comes a politician who has
none of that artfulness, and who threatens to collapse the whole structure by
being too obvious about it. He blurts
out racist and misogynist things instead of using the well-honed dog whistles
that his party has refined over the decades.
Even though he’s a millionaire himself, he doesn’t seem to have learned
the language very well. He doesn’t have
that millionaire sense of solidarity.

So, like an iceberg in Antarctica, the
Republican Party is going to calve. That
doesn’t mean we’ll be better off as a nation, although we could make some progress
during the time it takes for it – or the new party - to build itself up again.

And what about the eclipses of
March? The first one, a total solar
eclipse on March 8, has Jupiter in Virgo facing off against the sun, moon, Mercury
and Neptune in Pisces. This mass of Pisces
planets is like the solid dedication of true believers, who only need something
or someone who will fulfill their fantasies of deliverance.

This yearning to believe in something
has a lot to do with Trump’s success. He’s
the “Great White Hope”, a figure who can rescue the flawed dreams that have
been fed to white people in the US. We’ve
seen him in history before, and it doesn’t usually work out too well. But this figure has been known to do a lot of
damage before going down in flames.

On the other side of the wheel is Jupiter
in Virgo, which represents the principle of social organization. With Jupiter in an earthy sign, this is a practical
process, involving observation, good tools, and a certain amount of
trial-and-error. A static society is not
a healthy one, and so Jupiter in Virgo represents change that’s both logical
and ecological. Ideally, everything
grows organically and cooperatively. Of course,
for true believers, this is limiting and even boring.

Then on March 23, there’s a penumbral
lunar eclipse. It’s not quite as
intense, but because the sun is in the fire sign Aries, there are conflicts that
now move into the open. This eclipse
emphasizes the Aries/Libra axis, which is about independence vs. law. Rebellious movements could gain a foothold.

The Jupiter/Saturn square is very close,
and so there could also be an economic downturn around the time of this eclipse. This won’t necessarily last a long time, but
it’s a good idea to be a bit more frugal in March, in preparation for this. There could be a moment of reckoning when
many people have to figure out what to do about long-term commitments. Can we still afford to do the things we once
planned?

As a society, we may also have to look
at long-term plans. Saturn is in
Sagittarius, the sign of travel, so problems with roads and bridges may become
more evident, and perhaps very dangerous.
Funds will need to be diverted to deal with this, and where will these
funds come from? The millionaire class,
and their pet politicians, will join together with an obvious answer: let’s try again to get rid of health
care.

But Jupiter’s other aspects do point to
change, so there will be a regrouping. For
many of us, spring is a chance to sketch out the world we’d like to live
in. If nature can reinvent herself, why
can’t we? For myself, I’d like to see a
world with neither racists nor millionaires, but I think that will take more
than one season.